Last year, two designs by Tomáš Holek marveled at the stars. One of those games, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has enraptured audiences with its thoughtful quest to discover life beyond our planet. The other title is Galileo Galilei, a boilerplate Euro with a few good ideas in its head and some profoundly spurious history in its belly.

This review is for the weaker of the two. Get ready to squint into the eyepiece.

Starry messengers. Also a scoring track.

Before we get into the rough stuff, it would do Galileo Galilei a disservice to bypass the basics, including the details that stand out as noteworthy inclusions in an otherwise bland experience.

The artwork, for one. Michal Peichl’s illustrations are lovely. The rulebook is clear that none of these images are anywhere close to what Galileo, Kepler, or their peers would have spied through such rudimentary telescopes. Galileo’s troubles began when he affixed his optics on Jupiter and spied three other “stars” in a straight line beside it, only to discover that those stars seemed to be orbiting Jupiter rather than remaining fixed in the heavens, as had been assumed in Europe since the days of Aristotle. Rather than painting Galileo’s Medicean Stars as pale blips, Peichl and Holek instead reveal their celestial bodies in detail. All the better, I think, for helping the game’s audience understand the sheer enormity of these discoveries, even if we see them in greater clarity than their discoverers could have.

Similarly, there’s a breadth to the game’s discovery that, in the right frame of mind, is breathtaking. It’s hard to imagine today just how tectonic these shifts were, displacing the ground from beneath everybody’s feet as the Earth was flung into motion after standing at the center of God’s creation. To represent these groundswells, Holek offers one discovery after another. Comets are used to chart the motion of the heavens, discounting the price of other discoveries. Constellations are breadwinners in terms of score. (The game doesn’t explain why, but think navigation and cartography.) And then, of course, there are the major bodies, the Milky Way, nebulae, planets, meteor showers, all repositioning humanity’s place in the universe.

Your telescope views both moveable and immovable objects, which is a nifty callback.

The centerpiece of the whole experience is your telescope, a fancy version of a rondel that shifts between actions, permitting both a fixed option — making a discovery is the big one, but there are also options for moving up the ivory tower or upgrading your pieces — and moveable tiles that shift with each use.

For the most part, this rondel is stronger in concept than execution. Turns veer between minor and distended. When your learn’d astronomer isn’t parlaying one discovery into the next, they’re usually shifting pips on three-colored dice, a serviceable if somewhat uninspiring currency. These dice are then spent on discoveries, with major bodies requiring multiple colors while constellations only take one. Basically, you’re either gaining resources or spending them, with occasional free actions to shift colors. It works well enough. It also never feels anything like discovery, in either the legwork or excitement department.

Underlying these discoveries, however, is something rotten. Whenever you investigate the heavens too closely, and especially when you publish your findings, the Inquisition soon catches wind of your activities. This seeds your cellar with inquisitors, red-hooded punks who sit around and detract from your score. This is where Galileo Galilei starts to resemble something more, a game with a point rather than a mere points-tallier.

Except it flubs the delivery.

So… anybody want a panini?

Don’t get me wrong, there are some cool aspects to the system. The Inquisition takes a bite out of your score at the end of the game, but you can save your life’s work from obscurity on the Church Index by responding to their arguments, shifting those inquisitors rightward across your parlor. This triggers a small adjustment phase where your astronomer’s standing shifts, usually losing some measure of points. This encourages players to align their actions such that they persuade their opposition as much as possible within the span of a single turn, calling to mind historical windows (the election of a new pope, for example) when one could act to perhaps stave off suspicion.

All the while, the track for the Inquisition is suitably intimidating. You’ll lose points, sure, but it also illustrates the various tortures one could expect if they denied the celestial status quo too explicitly. The threat of violence is never far from mind.

Until it isn’t. Which is where the troubles for Galileo Galilei become their most pronounced. Because it’s possible to not only stave off suspicion, but more or less become the Inquisition’s best bud. By pushing your inquisitors all the way across your cellar, your astronomer will no longer lose points. Instead, they begin to move forward along the Inquisition track. The hellfires recede, the tortures become less crippling. Gradually, the subtraction to your score transforms into a net positive. Suddenly, the Church’s militant wing becomes not only benign, but a boon.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily happen. It’s entirely possible to saddle yourself with too much heat. In some plays, Galileo Galilei reveals a wildly swingy endgame, some players losing tens of points while others experience an uptick thanks to their positive relationship with tongs-and-pincers torturers. To succeed, then, is to placate the Inquisition, maybe even hop into bed with them, in order to avoid their worst ravages. Worse, because you start in the negative by default, it isn’t even enough to lie low. To conclude the game with a positive modifier, you want to draw the Inquisition’s eye.

I have inquisitors in the parlor. Maybe this is a good thing?

Which is, in case anybody is confused, the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Galileo Galilei, the man himself, spent most of his life under attack. The Dominican priest Tommaso Caccini famously denounced him by quoting Acts in a sermon (“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” — not very nice, but a killer pun), and Galileo eventually lived the final nine years of his life under house arrest, forced to recant his discoveries under threat of torture. He surely took these threats seriously. His predecessor, Giordano Bruno, had spent a significant portion of his life tactfully avoiding Italy, only to return home, attempt to thread the court’s doctrinal needle for seven long years, and get burned alive at the stake for his troubles. Johannes Kepler, living in the Holy Roman Empire where the Church’s hold was more tenuous thanks to the whole Protestant Reformation thing, escaped direct affliction, but his theories still probably contributed to his mother’s witchcraft trial, forcing him to retreat from his work for a humiliating year to come to her defense. Nicholas Copernicus, meanwhile, was less sheltered by the religious divide, instead coming under attack from both the Catholic Church and Protestants alike. Philip Melanchthon took particular interest in deriding his work.

These four — Galileo, Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus — are the four protagonists of Galileo Galilei. But despite their careful defenses of their work, even despite the fact that most were devout Christians, they were attacked, denounced, censored, exiled, tortured, imprisoned, or murdered. There was no point at which the Inquisition track bore points in their favor.

Nor, ultimately, were their observations and theories successfully repressed. The Copernican Revolution is considered the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, (slowly) breaking from the scholasticism and theology that had dominated European epistemology for centuries. In game terms, they succeeded despite receiving various negative scores on the Inquisition track.

Education above, repression below.

Of course, Galileo Galilei’s violation of history is fully in line with the Eurogame template, willing to approach a point but also compromising that point in service to the tyranny of the scoring track. When everything must be read into the system as modifiers, it’s natural to assume that even something as oppressive as the Inquisition can be tallied this way. It isn’t as though Holek is alone in presenting history so simply.

All the same, it’s disappointing that Galileo Galilei should touch upon this history while still twisting itself in pretzels to misrepresent it so badly. As a game, it’s fine. Straightforward, somewhat dull, not especially exciting. As a depiction of the astronomers it celebrates, it fares worse, pretending that religious suppression might be placated or even, after enough debate or appeasement, favor those with open, curious minds. Sadly, this was no more the case in the 16th and 17th centuries than it is today.

The result is a game that tries but fails to inspire. Galileo Galilei turns its gaze to the stars, but in tallying its points so flippantly, fails to tally the costs borne by those who made the discoveries that opened the heavens. Hopefully SETI fares better.

A complimentary copy of Galileo Galilei was provided by the publisher.

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